


Mavis and Miranda

by Transposable_Element



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome, The Melendy Quartet - Elizabeth Enright
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mentor/Protégé, Two Nations Divided By a Common Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 03:19:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2008962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transposable_Element/pseuds/Transposable_Element
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London, 1948. Randy Melendy goes to the right person with her nickname problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mavis and Miranda

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this with the date 1951, but then I decided that Randy was acting awfully young for her age, so I moved the date back a few years. And I can't resist tinkering, so I've made a few changes to clarify a couple of things.
> 
> This is a one-off, not connected to anything else I've written. For one thing, I needed Titty to be an art teacher, and that would be unlikely in 1940's Britain if she were married, as she is the other place I've written about her.

When Mavis Walker arrived at her office at the art college, there was a student sitting outside her door. Her dark curls were disheveled, and she was holding her head in her hands. It was the new American exchange student, what was her name? Oh yes….

“Miss Melendy?” The girl didn’t answer. “Miranda? What’s wrong?” she asked.

The girl looked up. Her face was dry, but her eyes were a bit red. “Oh, Miss Walker, I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea. And now I don’t know what to do about it!”

Mavis was no more enlightened than she had been before, but clearly getting to the bottom of this was going to involve some gentle soothing and possibly a cup of tea. She unlocked her office door and ushered the girl in. Miranda was babbling: “I’m not sure who else to ask about it, but you seem so nice, and you’re younger than most of the other teachers here, and I don’t know what to do….”

She sat Miranda down and after the monologue had ground to a halt, she asked again: “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know there was anything wrong with being called Randy!” Miranda said.

“Sorry?” said Mavis, taken aback.

“It’s my nickname! It’s a perfectly good nickname at home. Nobody thinks there’s anything funny about it. It’s sort of a boy’s nickname, but there’s nothing wrong with that, lots of girls are called Jackie or Billie. But here it means something else, something dirty, and gee whiz, I don’t even know what!….I wish I hadn’t told anybody….But it’s too late! Now everybody knows!”

“Oh dear,” Mavis said, sighing. “Well, you certainly came to the right place…”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll explain in a minute. What happened, exactly?”

“My roommate introduced me to some of her friends, and we were talking, and I just said ‘by the way, at home everybody calls me Randy.’ And they were all quiet for a minute and then they started laughing and making jokes that I didn’t even understand….”

“What did your roommate do?”

“She wasn’t there by then, she’d had to go do an errand. That’s why she introduced me to her friends, she didn’t want to leave me by myself when I don’t know very many people yet….But Miss Walker, what does it mean? Nobody would say, they just thought it was funny that I didn’t know.”

“It means sort of…lustful. Wanting to have sex.”

Miranda’s eyes widened. “Oh, gee whiz! So if I say I’m Randy…oh _jeepers_!”

“Yes. I’m sorry nobody told you before you said it in front of a lot of people. You must’ve told your roommate your nickname. Didn’t she warn you?”

“She’s French. Her English is pretty good, but I guess she didn’t realize….”

“Oh dear, that’s too bad. And unfortunately, once people know, it’s hard to make them forget it.”

“Gosh. What am I going to do?”

Mavis sighed. “If it’s any comfort, I know exactly what you’re going through. When I was a child, my nickname was Titty.”

Miranda goggled. “Does that mean...the same thing it means at home?”

“More or less, yes.”

“Well then, why was it your nickname? You’re not very…I mean, you said this was when you were a child.”

“It was after a character in a book, Titty Mouse. The thing is, the word means the same thing here as it does in the States, but it has other meanings, too: it means small, like in tit-bits. Do you use that expression?”

“We say tidbits.”

“Ah. Well anyway, there was that, and a lot of people knew the story about Titty Mouse, and it’s a nickname for Letitia. So when I was a girl people would snigger a bit sometimes, but everybody understood that the name didn’t refer to my breasts, and nobody really bothered me about it. Not to my face, anyway.”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“No, it really wasn’t. But then during the war…I was out one evening with some friends, and we met some American soldiers. It was just a couple of months before the Normandy invasion.”

“D-Day?” Miranda asked, sitting up respectfully.

“Yes. And these soldiers heard my name and they thought it was dreadfully funny. And that would have been bad enough, but then they started grabbing at me…”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes. So my friends got me out of there, but the next day it was all over the American army base. And then for a while any time I ran into any of the soldiers from the base, I’d have the same problem.”

“Jeepers! What did you do?”

“Well, for one thing I asked people to start calling me Mavis, and only Mavis. I’d been meaning to do it for a while, anyway.”

“But I don’t like to be called Miranda.”

“Why not? It’s a pretty name.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just that whenever my brother thinks I’m being a sissy, he calls me Miranda.”

“Well, he’s not here, is he?”

“No, he’s in New York. And to be fair, he hasn’t done that in a long time.” She sighed. “It’s a good thing he’s not here, because he’d probably sock some of those boys, and he’s a pianist, so he really needs to be careful of his hands.”

“I think Miranda is a nice name. Unusual and a bit romantic. And changing your name can be a good opportunity, especially when you’re in a new place, with new people. You can be a new person, the person you want to be.”

“I guess so…” said Miranda, doubtfully. “But what else can I do?”

“You need allies,” Mavis said. “You’ve got me, that’s a good start. And your roommate, probably. What’s her name?”

“Hélène Sagan,” she said.

“I know her. She’s a nice girl, I’m sure she’ll want to help.”

“Yes, she’s been really great so far. I’m sure she didn’t know what randy means here…”

“And then once you have allies, you have to stand up to for yourself. Don’t just ignore it and hope they’ll get bored and stop bothering you—that never works. You’ll need to come up with some good retorts. Maybe perfect a withering, scornful gaze.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Yes. And as I said, I had allies. One evening my friend Nancy made three big marines back down with their tails between their legs. That was a sight worth seeing!”

“I wonder why they were so mean to you…”

“Well, they were about to go out and storm the beaches and maybe get killed,” Mavis said. “I’m sure they were afraid, but they were too big and tough to admit it."

"So they were letting off steam?"

"I suppose so…I was a nurse’s aid, and I did have fantasies about some of them coming in with wounds—not really serious ones, of course, but painful—and recognizing me and begging my forgiveness while I dug shrapnel out of their legs...”

“Did that ever happen?”

“No…And of course some of them probably _were_ killed, in Normandy, or later on. Thinking about that makes me feel bad about how angry I was at them, but...you've no idea how terrifying it is to have a bunch of men grabbing at you like that...at least, I hope you've no idea.”

Miranda shook her head. "I've led a pretty sheltered life, really. But...I have a friend, or actually he's my brother now. He used to live with his horrible cousin who beat him up and practically worked him to death. And then the cousin was killed in a fire, and I felt so guilty, because in a way I was glad about it...not that he was killed, but just that Mark was free of him." 

The discussion turned to other topics. They talked about their families and the places they had grown up, and it turned out that they had a lot in common. After a while Mavis said, “I really ought to be going, my sister is expecting me for supper. Do you want to come along? I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. We can go collect Hélène as well, and put our heads together with Susan and her family, think up some good ways to deal with your problem. All right?”

“Yes, thank you so much! I really did come to the right person!”

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't set out to write this, but I was thinking about slipping Rush Melendy into another piece I was working on, and I realized that Titty and Randy had to meet. Aside from the embarrassing nicknames, they really do have a lot in common: they're both middle children in families of five; they're both imaginative, sensitive dreamers; they have similar roles in their families; etc. One thing that made the idea of Randy getting advice from Titty appealing is that a common narrative device in the Melendy books is one of the children meeting an interesting older person who tells a story about their childhood. Randy would be about 18 in 1948.


End file.
